The Wow Wow Wow Thinking of the Super-Founders


From my previous post, I defined a Super Founder as follows:
A Super-Founder has both the skills (1) to bootstrap the company and (2) to manage the growth creatively when an abundance of funding suddenly becomes available.
A founder in general thinks like this; I have a new technology, I get some seed funding, I get customers, I offer the product or service for free or low price. When I have more customers, I increase the prices, I get a few more rounds of capital, I flip the company and I am rich.

Google's super founders created the best web search technology in the world. For a while they sold some search appliances for private businesses. But they soon realized the biggest, by far, potential is advertising.

When we say advertising, we used to think instinctively in newspapers. in 2014 the top newspapers in the nation, like The New York Times struggle to replace sinking ad revenues , which for NYT  are maybe $0.8 B per year.

Google makes $32.2 billion per year, at least 40x  New York Times advertising revenues. Even more amazing, the total revenues of Disney Media Networks  (everything, not only advertising)  is $ 20.3 billion. Google makes 50% more in ad revenues only.

 This is obvious today. It was not in 1999. All other revenues are $1.1 billion for Google. If Google would  have not taken the path of ad income as main income, they would have been a $1.1 billion company. This would have been a supreme success for most success stories in high tech.

But the Google Super-Founders executed a phenomenal monetization plan.

See this self-explanatory infographic produced by Larry Kim, The founder and CTO of WordStream:


We have a similar story at Facebook, another Super-Founder company

Facebook growing ad revenues are 91% of total revenues
Now, for Facebook, remains to be seen how it will leverage the WhatsApp application. I can not predict because as a humble blogger, I have not the vision of a Super-Founder.


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